The track dedicated to Social + Non-Profit will gather ambitious life stories about helping others and projects whose purpose is to invest everything in making the world a better place. You will have the opportunity to meet colleagues from your field of interest and join forces, learn how to use pre-configured Drupal distributions and get inspired by ambitious social impact projects built with Drupal. Also learn how Drupal can be used to ensure accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, money, and faith into a non-profit organization. Talk and share ideas, learn from each other, improve, innovate … and take a leap forward. There are a lot of things you will learn, no matter your technical skill level. From developers to people with a big heart, you will for sure find something that inspires you.

We are looking for submissions in various topics. Here are some ideas to share your experience on with the rest of the world.

Every nonprofit organization must apply the 3 E’s: Economy, Efficiency, Effectiveness. Economy forces you to handle your project with low budgets, that is almost always the case with non-profit organizations. Efficiency is required also due to low resources available to most non-profit organizations. Effectiveness ensures you get the job done and complete your targets. How are you doing that? What tools and practices ensure this?

We live in a world that is changing every day and technology is a big part of it. What are the new technologies you integrate in social projects? What do you need and what do you find on the market? How drupal is helping you achieve your goals?

Transparency, accountability and full disclosure on operations is a must for all non-profit organizations. People will donate to and support campaigns only if they know exactly where the money goes and how are things handled. This way, they ensure their credibility in front of the world. How do you technically implement this?

A lot of people talk about making the world a better place. But talking is not enough. You have to take action! How do you plan to do it? How do social activities raise the level of engagement in your community? How are people’s lives improved by your actions?

Non-profit is done mainly from the heart. Volunteering is the key word. What are your life stories about helping others, inspirational first hand experiences? Why, what and how did you do it? What drives you? What are your goals?

About industry tracks

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blog posts, industry verticals are a new concept being introduced at Drupal Europe and replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday. At Drupal Europe these industry verticals are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket and provide more opportunities to learn and exchange within the industry verticals throughout three days.

About the Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

So your site isn’t working the way you want it to. Maybe it’s sluggish, or you’re not seeing the conversions you want, or customers are complaining. Before you drop a huge chunk of your budget on a complete rebuild, consider that there might be a simpler (and more affordable) solution to your website woes.

We see a lot of Drupal 7 and WordPress websites here at Kanopi Studios, and we often discover that it’s more cost-effective for our clients to simply update their sites rather than rebuilding them. Making targeted updates can allow you to focus on addressing a few key issues, while still leveraging the investment of time, energy and funds that went into your site’s foundation.

In this series, we’ll look at three key topics to consider:

1. How do you know when it’s time for a change?2. Is your website optimally organized and designed to be user-friendly?3. How strong is your technical foundation?

How do I know it’s time for a change?

Do any of these problems sound familiar?

Low conversion rates

Site pages take more than 3 seconds to load

Site doesn’t work well on mobile or other devices

Updating content is a difficult and frustrating process

Users struggle to find what they need on the site or have shared negative feedback

Site crashes when updating

Too many bugs

Building new features is difficult or may not even be possible

Site is not loading on https and triggers security warnings

If your answer to any of these is yes, it’s time to take action.

But first … is it really that important for me to address these issues?

Yes! A website that isn’t working optimally can dramatically affect your bottom line. An out-of-date or poorly designed website can:

Damage your credibility. If your website loads slowly, is crowded with clutter or is just plain not working, you are sending the message that your company is unprofessional.

Make you appear out of touch. A dated website tells your customers you are behind the technological times, or worse – you don’t care enough to stay up-to-date.

Cost you customers. Every customer who leaves your site in frustration due to broken links, complex forms, slow pages or confusing navigation is a customer you won’t get back. If your competitors offer similar services and have a stronger website experience, your loss will be their gain.

Decision time. If you want to avoid the damage that a dated website can cause, you’ll need to either rebuild your site or update it. If you’re ready to take action, we can help you find the best and most cost-effective approach.

There are two primary things to consider when maximizing your site’s ROI: your user’s needs and the technology that drives your site. If you can identify and fix problems in both of these categories, you can most likely avoid a costly rebuild.

Now that you’ve decided that it’s time to take action to improve your website, It’s time to see if any user experience upgrades could help. Take a look through our list of issues below, and the tips to help resolve them.

Having a hard time converting leads or getting sales?

If you’re not sure why you’re not generating business from your website, it’s time to get serious about strategy. Here’s how:

Add a survey to your website to understand what users are looking for

Take a look at your analytics to understand where you are losing your users. If you don’t have analytics installed, get either Google Analytics or Tag Manager set up on your site.

Try an online user testing platform like Hotjar to help you go beyond standard analytics with heatmaps, visitor recordings, conversion funnels and more.Complete a User Experience & Conversion Optimization Audit with Kanopi Studios. We can make a whole range of insightful recommendations within your budget. Contact us to learn more.

Does your site take forever to load?

If it takes longer than three seconds, you have a problem.

Use Google PageSpeed or Pingdom to test your site’s speed, understand what might be slowing it down and take action to resolve any issues.

Make sure you have a reliable hosting company backing your site at the right level for the amount of traffic you receive.

Does your site work on mobile? Is it accessible?

It’s vital to make sure your site is accessible to everyone, no matter what device or screen size they are using. Here’s how to check:

Try using your site on a phone or a tablet. If you have to pinch or zoom to interact with the content, it’s time for a responsive design.

Make sure you can tab through all navigation and content on your site using only your keyboard, that all images have alt tags, and that you are able to use a voice browser to “read” your pages out loud. If not, you are missing key elements of accessibility.

Contact Kanopi Studios about an accessibility audit. We can help you identify the issues and build a plan for how to resolve them.

Is it frustrating – or impossible – to update content on your site?

If it’s a major undertaking to change even the simplest thing, something needs to happen.

Define your ideal workflow, then ask an expert to take a look and see how you can optimize the backend.

Consider the types of content that your site needs to support. Do you have templates in place that meet your needs? If not, it may be time to consider a bit of design and development time to build additional page types on your site.

Getting negative user feedback?

If the people visiting your site are taking the time to complain, chances are they might also take the time to help you make things better. Here’s how:

Collect feedback by sending out a survey, or document your customer service calls.

Always thank people for taking the time to help you improve.

Look for trends in the information you are receiving from users and build a plan to address any issues to help meet their needs

If none of the issues above apply, congratulations! Your user experience is likely more solid than many of the websites out there! But there are still more things to consider before committing to rebuilding your site. In our next post, we will walk you through a number of common technical issues and some helpful fixes for them.

Now that you’ve considered your user experience, there are a number of possible technical fixes that might help resolve your website problems.

What version of Drupal or WordPress are you using?

WordPress 2, while old, may or may not require a rebuild. You might be able to get by with updating and refactoring.

If you’re using Drupal 7 or WordPress 3, a rebuild is likely not needed.

However, if you are on Drupal 6, it is at the end of its life, which may make rebuilding more cost-effective and viable for the long term.

Does your site use a lot of custom code?

If so, what does that code do, and are you still using that functionality? Look for ways to streamline where possible.

Is your site’s code a nightmare?

Did you use a professional firm with a North American team? An offshore team? A freelance developer? Or an internal employee who no longer works at your company? It’s a good idea to get the code reviewed so that you can determine its quality and understand whether it will be easy to update or if you’d be better off starting from scratch. Contact Kanopi for a low-cost assessment.

Are you up to date with the latest security patches and updates?

Lapses can expose the site to hacks and backdoors. Often just updating your site and modules/plugins can solve many issues.

Want to learn more about how we can help you understand every aspect of your site and determine if you need to rebuild or update to help achieve your goals? Contact us to book a free 15-minute consultation. Click here to book a time.

By now you have likely heard quite a bit about Drupal 8. But do you have a good sense of when and why to make the switch?

Switching to Drupal 8 will make new features and functionality available for your site and help you stay current with the latest best practices. But it will take time and effort, and may mean a bit of refactoring as well.

What’s new in Drupal 8?

Drupal 8 adds a number of helpful features into core, making it possible to build fully-featured websites out of the box. Drupal 8 takes care of basic needs, so contributed modules can be reserved for specialized functionality.

There are more than 200 new features in Drupal 8, including built-in support for multilingual and mobile-friendly sites, a simplified content authoring experience with in-place editing, native web services, Views integration into core, stronger HTML5 support and much more.

In addition, Drupal 8 is written in well structured, object-oriented PHP based on the Symfony framework. And it leverages the Twig templating system, making design patterns simpler, faster, more logical and more secure.

Once you are on Drupal 8, you can easily take advantage of minor releases that will add powerful functionality on a predictable schedule, without requiring you to reinvent your site. And the focus on backwards compatibility beginning with Drupal 9 means upgrading between major versions won’t be a massive headache like it has been with past versions of Drupal.

Time to switch?

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding to switch to Drupal 8. In general, the sooner you can bring your site up to the most up-to-date standards, the better. But it’s also important to consider your objectives when deciding on the best time for an upgrade.

If the functionality in Drupal 8 would revolutionize the way you do business, or you are considering rolling out significant new functionality, now might be a good time to switch. But if your Drupal 7 site is running well and there aren’t any solid business reasons to make the switch, you may consider holding off until Drupal 9 becomes available.

To help clarify your decision, we’ve created a quiz to help you determine when it’s time to make the switch.

The Drupal Association can not take credit for the amazing success of the Drupal project, but will highlight the success of the community in its efforts to keep supporting the project. We are supported by Individuals and Organizations who become yearly members. Our membership makes the Drupal.org infrastructure possible and supports community initiatives. Organization Membership information is below the Individual Memberships, scroll down to see. Annual membership for individuals supports the Drupal Association and its community projects.